Bespoken Porsche | Chris Runge

All it takes to build one of the
most desirable sports cars is, it seems, a barn, some sheet metal
and a hammer or two. That, at least, was Chris Runge’s determined,
hopeful thinking. “I’d always loved the idea of those homebuilt
cars of the post-war period - guys similarly on very restricted
budgets who just wanted to go fast and so built with basic hand
tools,” says Runge, one-time champion snowboarder turned
self-appointed auto designer and maker - with an order book for
custom drives as long as Route 66. “There’s a rawness and an
honesty to the ‘H mod’ cars or ‘specials’ that were built then.
They were perfect in my eyes precisely because they weren’t
perfectly finished. Cars today are too perfect, to the point of
having no soul.”

Indeed, if most barn finds are
dilapidated vintage cars requiring years of restoration work, in
Runge's barn - on his father's Minnesota farm - is found a sleek,
silvery vehicle taking its aesthetic cues from the past, but built
new and decidedly race-ready. This is the Frankfurt Flyer, a
near-mythical car that took its inspiration from the Porsche-based
race cars built by C. H. Weidenhausen for Walter Glockler, whose
designs of the 1940s and 1950s in turn took their inspiration from
the principals and materials of aeronautical design, and which
final found official recognition from the car giant
itself.

Runge has always been a Porsche
fanatic - he got his first, a 1978 911 Targa, when he was 18. But
he always dreamed of the super-lightweight aluminium bodied 356,
the kind of rare beast typically owned only by those of unlimited
resources. So, he reasoned - unreasonably - that he would make his
own. When Runge acquired his latest Porsche, a 1967 912 model, from
an estate sale, he found that it came with a load of other parts as
well as metal shaping tools, lathes, bending brakes, welders and
even a home-built computer-controlled vertical mill... So he got to
work.

“It was a pretty steep learning
curve,” Runge recalls of his 1,800 hours of building and fiddling
with donor Porsche parts the likes of 944 Porsche bump shocks, as
well as Penske shocks and VW Beetle suspension. “I knew very little
about the techniques of working with metal - but fortunately the
metal-shaping community is more like a brotherhood, with a lot of
people willing to share their knowledge. Day to day the build was a
labour of love. But I found that something about metal clicks with
me, and aluminium especially. It’s very attractive just in sheet
form, but gets more attractive as it takes shape and
shine.”

Certainly this almost mystical
connection with metal, as well as natural skills in hand-moulding
panels to make streamlined, retro-futuristic racers has not gone
unnoticed. Through his Frankfurt Motorwerks - that Germanic 'e' a
nice touch - Runge now offers various coupe and Spyder incarnations
in limited numbers, as well as bespoke commissions. Each echoes
Runge's deep-seated idea of the kind of vehicle that gives the
experience of 'true' driving: a mid-engined, centre cockpit alloy
car with no frills at all; the kind of car, he notes, that might
kill the driver who doesn't pay utmost attention.

“These are the kind of cars that
seems to be on rails,” he says. “In that there’s some parallel
between a Porsche and a good snowboard - they share similar
handling characteristics. And of course both offer you the chance
to really push yourself in certain situations...”

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Josh Sims

Josh Sims is a writer on menswear, design and much else for the likes of Wallpaper, CNN, Robb Report and The Times. He's the author of several books on menswear, the latest 'The Details', published by Laurence King. He lives in London, has two small children and is permanently exhausted.